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New Kind of Fusion Reactor Built at Government Lab

The stellarator has permanent magnets, a first for a fusion experiment.

A team of physicists and engineers at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory built a twisting fusion reactor known as a stellarator that uses permanent magnets, showcasing a potentially cost-effective way of building the powerful machines. The LLNL breakthrough was done by shining powerful lasers at a pellet of atoms, a different process than the plasma-based fusion reactions that occur in tokamaks and stellarators. Little tweaks to the devices, like the implementation of permanent magnets in MUSE or an upgraded tungsten diverter in the KSTAR tokamak, make it easier for scientists to replicate the experimental setups and perform experiments at high temperatures for longer.

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